Friday, 29 March 2024

Peterson: Life on the Mississippi

As an unreconstructed cheesehead from Wisconsin, the Mississippi River has always been a special place to me. It's one of my personal permanent wonders of the world.


Never more so than tonight, when several thousand miles away as I was writing my daughter, who lives in St. Paul with her husband and their child, my first and only (so far) grandchild, I got one of those shocks we foolish mortals are prone to getting.


I was telling her about Jerry Day on this Sunday (Aug. 5) in San Francisco, where Melvin Seals of the Jerry Garcia Band, a wonderfully named Deadhead group called Workingman's Ed, and another – Jelly – are playing a free concert from noon to 7 p.m. (Check out JerryDay.org for info).


And I was listening to our 21st Century Edward R. Murrow, Keith Olbermann, whose editorials spoken into the camera directly to us and the Doofus in the White House I try to seldom miss. Then, there was a bulletin about a bridge collapse over the Mississippi near the University of Minnesota.


Like anyone who was here in 1989, I thought of Loma Prieta. A friend was running that day near a creek in Pescadero. She said the creek sort of gurgled up and shook all over kingdom come. God was willin' and the creek did rise. In Sonoma, where my family lived at the time, the intersection I was driving through changed directions – sort of – as our home shook, rattled and rolled. We had a foreign student from Austria at the time and she was there alone and ran screaming out into the street. They don't have a lot of earthquakes in "Wienna." She knew about Arnold already, of course, and arrived wearing a "Free James Brown!" T-Shirt. Everyone in Austria knew about Arnold. Now, it's our turn.


But what really stopped my heart and took the breath out of me was worry about how my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson, who looks like a 6-six-month old Dr. Evil in the photo I have of him on my dresser, were. He has a finger on his mouth. Can you say: "One million dollars?"


I called right away and got my son-in-law. Everyone was OK though they had driven across the bridge in question precisely, give or take a few hours, one day earlier. I was more than relieved, but have remained a wee bit shook up ever since.


I've seen my grandson once and I want to see him again in December when he and his parents come home to my son-in-law's hometown, Palo Alto, and stay with his magnificent family. He calls home "Shallow Alto" and went to New College as did my daughter. (Yes, people meet in jazz ensembles.) And he could have gone to Stanford for free since his father is a professor of surgery there. I didn't go to the main University of Wisconsin campus because I would have had to live at home. I went to the one in Milwaukee instead, so what else is new?


What else is new it that I'm eternally grateful to whoever I should be eternally grateful to for the safety of my children and their child and about as aware as we all need to get everyday about how much the people you love mean to you.


Hug somebody if you've got someone to hug.


I'm in my retirement apartment in Belmont unable to sleep. But I'm thinking of them and I'm thinking about the Mississippi.


We had to learn to spell it in school back there. I lived near it and was on it many times. I went to many sites from Mark Twain's Life On The Mississippi – the harbor in Dubuque, Nauvoo, the Mormon settlement that is now a living history museum; the Crescent City, the place where U.S. soldiers massacred the old and young of the Sauk-Fox tribe, and so on.


I love taking Amtrak to Chicago and finally crossing the Big Muddy at last. When I moved to Alaska my then 7-year-old son and I saw lots of eagles on the river crossing from Wisconsin to Minnesota. And, in Alaska at Haines, which has the largest eagle population in the world. Or, did. Now, you see them on The Colbert Report.


And once just before crossing the river Huck and Jim haunt, on the train again, an old farmer from Iowa woke up all the residents in the Sicko car (I had fallen down the steps of Old Main at my daughter's college during student orientation when I took her to Antioch by train and plane and was on crutches). The farmer insisted everyone in that train wake up and listen to the song he wanted us all to hear. It was 5 a.m.


He played Spike Jones on the radio and that is one moment I will never forget.


My children both can sing most of the Spike Jones songbook forced on them at a young age by me as my father had forced it on me. Something for which I remain most grateful.


Thanks, Dad, for Stan Freberg, too and for my grandson – your great-grandson – Orion Sage Sibley's intense blue eyes. He just turned 1 and this Christmas he's learning "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth."

 

Gary Peterson lives in Belmont. 

 

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